James R. Gorman

December 3, 2000 (First Sunday of Advent)

There is an old prayer written for this advent season that goes like this:

"Give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal."

Advent is a paradox (two opposite ideas contained in one word). Christ comes in humility as a babe in an ox's feeding trough, and he comes again in glory to judge between the living and the dead. In Advent, we await both those comings.

All the paradoxical themes of Advent are compressed into that handful of words from that prayer: Christ coming at Christmas time in great humility and again at the end of time in glorious majesty--Christ coming as a child to accompany us in our loneliness and as a king to judge us. These two opposite ideas clatter against each other like shutters of an old house in a hurricane. They all but deafen us with their message at one and the same time

grace on the one hand and sin on the other

mercy and justice,

comfort in our great need and challenge in our moral laziness.

Light for our darkness and a bit too much light when darkness hides our shortcomings and our self-justifications.

"Cast away the works of darkness," they say, and put on "the armor of light." Maybe those are the words that best sum up the paradox of who we are and where we are. We all reside somewhere between the darkness and the light. That is where we are as Christians, hating the darkness on the one hand and using it to our advantage on the other.

Seeing the signs of Christ's great coming at the end of time and Christ's coming in humility in the midst of our darkness is not as easy as reading the signs like the budding of the fig tree as a sign of the coming of spring, as Jesus says in the Gospel. Jesus is being a bit hard on us, I think. It is not always easy to discern the signs of his presence when we are weary, especially in this season.

We are always caught between the fact of darkness and the hope of light. That is our predicament, isn't it? The signs are not always so apparent, it seems to me.

"Advent" means "coming" of course, and the promise of Advent is that what is coming is an unimaginable invasion ... a close encounter not of the third kind but of a different kind altogether. An encounter with holiness. That is what Advent is about. An invasion of holiness which comes in humility to dwell among us and as the statement of faith puts it, "comes to us to share our common lot."

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It was thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away,

The oxen in their stalls.

The smell of old damp hay.

The shepherds standing around in sore amazement. That child and that place are somehow the closest of all possible encounters, the one we are closest to, the one that brings us closest to the light that shines in the darkness. This story that faith tells in the language of faith is not just that God exists, which is sort of the stuff of a freshman philosophy paper.

It is that God comes.

Comes here. Comes close.

"In great humility."

There is nothing much humbler than being born: naked, totally helpless, not much bigger that a loaf of bread. But to us he comes that way at the end of this season. For us God comes.

Is it true? Can this be believed? Can this story be trusted? That into my darkness God in Christ will come as the most marvelous of lights, and that light that comes into my darkness comes into all darknesses, all distress, all brokenness, all hopelessness. Every sort of disorientation and confusion. Every manner of despair. For that light, the good book says, is, after all, the Light of the World.

We are bold to proclaim this story true partly because it settles rightly and quietly upon our soul with introductory words that reach deep into our hearts. "In those days there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all were to be enrolled each to his own town ..."

We may not have always known that this story was about us. We might have thought, when we first learned it as a child and dressed up in uncle Ted's bathrobe with the cigar in the pocket when we acted in those innumerable Sunday School Christmas plays, that it was really just a story about people who were famous long ago. But the realization over the course of a long life is that this story is finally about us who dwell in the deep darkness, and about a world so deeply beloved of God.

And the world has never been quite the same since.

It is still a very dark world for so many, in some ways darker than ever. But the darkness is different because Christ keeps getting born into it. We reenact this story year after year to reinforce the comforting message that in this darkness we are not alone. The dark threats of holocaust. The threat of a poisoned earth, sea, and air. The threat of our own death or the death of someone we love most dearly.

Keeping a marriage together in difficult times.

The child helpless with pain.

The lost opportunity at work and in career.

The teenager who decides that life is no longer worth living and seeks out a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

The irony of our faith is that anyone who has ever known this one called Jesus has probably known him more in the darkness than anywhere else, because it was in the darkness that he first came and it is in the darkness where he seems to visit most often and most powerfully.

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What, if anything, have you and I done to do battle against the great darkness of things? As parents and the children of our own parents,

as wives and husbands and friends and lovers, grandparents, aunts and uncles,

as players of whatever parts we have been chosen to play in this world,

as wielders of whatever kind of power,

as possessors of whatever kind of wealth,

what other human beings have we touched and helped to heal by sacrificing some bit of ourselves?

"Bear fruit that befits repentance!" thunders the Baptist. "Give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armor of light," whispers the prayer we pray. Bear fruit. Put on light like a garment, like a uniform. That is the place to stop and also the place to start. It is the place to stop and think--think back, think ahead, think deep. It is the place to begin our lives anew, for they have been touched at their darkest moments by the visitation of our God in Jesus Christ.

It is for this that we wait.

In Bosnia. In Gaza. Inside the beltway. In the counting houses of Tallahassee and the juridical chambers of the Supreme Court. At 24th and Brown, and at the corner of 78th and a street called Hope.

We wait. For that almost imperceptible light in the deep darkness which we have inherited and maybe even bear some responsibility for creating and perpetuating. Who knows?

But in all this darkness, gracious, merciful and grace-filled God, give us the courage to see some small sign of your presence, even if that means living our lives differently so that we can see you. In the darkness, come Holy One, so that we might put on the armor of light.

Amen.

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